Supreme court justices lead largely private lives, but at a talk in Rhode Island on Tuesday, Elena Kagan shared a few details about how her fellow justices communicate with each other. They do so, it turns out, with ivory paper memos instead of email, just as they did when she was a clerk in 1987 and, well, probably not that much differently than they did in 1897, either.

"The justices are not necessarily the most technologically sophisticated people," said Kagan, who at 53 is the youngest member of the Supreme Court. She added that while clerks email each other, "the court hasn't really 'gotten to' email." However, she also said the justices have foregone fancy papers to experiment with at least one trapping of modern life: video games.

In a discussion with Kagan, the Brown University historian and librarian Ted Widmer suggested that because of recent revelations about the National Security Agency, the court would likely be hearing more cases regarding electronic surveillance. Kagan agreed that the court would probably face cases related to privacy and emerging technologies.

"I think we're going to have to be doing a lot of thinking about that," she said.

But she said that while justices seek help from younger employees, they also try to learn on their own. Kagan said that in her first year on the court, the justices were working on a case about the sale of violent video games to children and decided to immerse themselves in the topic by playing some undisclosed videogames on their own.

"It was kind of hilarious," she said.

It was justice Samuel Alito who powered up the XBox (or PlayStation?), according to documents related to a June 2011 decision that struck down a California law that banned the sale of some violent video games without parental supervision. In the majority decision, justice Antonin Scalia mentions that Alito "has done considerable research to identify video games in which 'the violence is astounding'".

Alito was astounded by things that would seem mundane to the average gamer. In a note on the decision, he described the violent games:

In some of these games, the violence is astounding. Victims by the dozens are killed with every imaginable implement, including machine guns, shotguns, clubs, hammers, axes, swords and chainsaws. Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire and chopped into little pieces. They cry out in agony and beg for mercy. Blood gushes, splatters and pools. Severed body parts and gobs of human remains are graphically shown. In some games, points are awarded based, not only on the number of victims killed, but on the killing technique employed.

However, Alito added: "But only an extraordinary imaginative reader who reads a description of a killing in a literary work will experience that event as vividly as he might if he played the role of the killer in a video game. To take an example, think of a person who reads the passage in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov kills the old pawn broker with an axe."

The comparison of video games to literature was a significant part of the majority decision.

"In the 1800s dime novels depicting crime and "penny dreadfuls" (named for their price and content) were blamed in some quarters for juvenile delinquency," Scalia wrote. "When motion pictures came along, they became the villain instead."

In reference to Alito's exploration of the video games, Scalia wrote: "Justice Alito recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us – but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression."

It's unclear if Scalia joined Alito in playing the games – just pause for a minute to picture that matchup – but he clearly prefers literature anyway:

"Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat," Scalia said. "But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones. Cruely violent video games, tawdry TV shows and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny is a question to which we devote our attention in Part III."